Women who believe men can be just “friends” are delusional.

Yep. Exactly this. Also if he can't shut up about that woman on work/in the sports club/wherever...he wants to sleep with her but she won't let him. Experienced that myself. He is not talking about her because she is such a great co-worker, but because in his mind he is already f*cking her.

Or they are/were friends with benefits!!! Any man who is keeping former women he's had sexual encounters with in his life (besides if they have to coparent) is a red flag!

If you allow a man to talk, he'll tell on himself.

I agree. Also don't assume that because a man is old enough to be your father/grandfather, that it's safe to be his friend or it's safe to be alone with him. In fact older men are often the creepiest and perviest of them all.

I was friends (lol) with a guy in college for EIGHT YEARS. Unbeknownst to me, he spent that entire time trying to get with me and even triangulated the women he dated into trying to make me jealous. Which of course didn't work because I wasn't interested in him.

I had no idea until our late 20s when he sent me hate mail bragging he'd just gotten engaged and how I'd "missed my chance" with him.

I was stunned. A decade wasted on this asshole.

He's one of the worst cases I've experienced, but not the only one. I befriended dozens of guys in my youth, all a total waste. It's only a matter of time before men try to get into your pants or sabotage your chances with other guys.

Now I only have male acquaintances or what I call 2nd tier friends i.e. we bond over mutual hobbies or career advancement and I might even invite some of them to my wedding, but I have a hard limit on their level of emotional and physical access to me.

They respect that and show affection by doing things for me. I'm not calling them every week to chat. That shit's for my family and girlfriends, and these guys are too busy prioritizing their own families anyway (as they should).

Grown men have no business prioritizing female friends and those that do have an agenda.

Or when they get a serious girlfriend.

And suddenly you realize they were just using you as a placeholder for attention and emotional comfort until someone who would actually fuck them in addition to all that came along.

This happened to me when I was younger. It all started when I had just started my thesis and I was sharing an office with another student who was also writing his thesis but had a different supervisor who was a real asshole. So we kind of bonded over venting about his supervisor and the struggles of writing and so on. I was never interested in him romantically and he never made a move on me, so naive me thought it was really a "just friends" thing. The constant bullying by his supervisor and later boss (which was real, I witnessed it) bothered him more and more over the years and it turned into me comforting him, late night calls, me going with him to the mental health providers and services, literally talking him off a ledge etc. He also supported me and helped me and my family out on numerous occasions, so I really considered it a friendship. He never really seemed to care if I dated other men, either.

This went on for years until he suddenly stopped responding to my texts. He literally went radio silent on all channels from one day to the other. Because of his mental health history I naturally started to worry and made some inquiries and found out through some mutual acquaintances that he had gotten a girlfriend the day before he stopped responding to my messages. I was pretty hurt but took the hint and stopped contacting him thinking maybe his girlfriend was (rightfully) wary about him having a close female friend.

Skip forward around 3 years(!) of zero contact, not even a fucking card when my father (whom he knew) died. Suddenly he texts me out of nowhere like nothing has happened and wants to reconnect and catch up. Guess, what? His girlfriend had just left him and suddenly I was good enough again. Fuck that.

I'm so sorry. I experienced similar things. Guys texting me out of the blue after months and years of silence. It's always due to the reason they lost their former mommymcbangmaid and look for the next best woman. That is how they see us: objects who are there to fulfill their needs. They do not fucking care about us as friends, they just like the benefits of having a woman around for emotional support etc. As soon as something better comes along you are thrown away.

Yeah I've learned from experience that men will interpret any kind of one-on-one interaction as romantic interest. Nowadays I don't have any male friends and whenever I interact with men, I'm polite and I stick to small talk.